There are thousands of different workout and diet programs you can use to improve your health and fitness. But the easiest way to improve your health and fitness is to find what I like to call “Physical Fun Activities.”
Physical Fun Activities are those physical activities that you don’t even consider exercise.
Activities like pick-up basketball games, Ultimate Frisbee, surfing, Tango dancing, cycling, Jiu Jitsu or kickboxing classes, hiking, indoor rock climbing, or jumping on the trampoline with your kids.
These activities are all physically demanding, get you moving, burn calories, and increase your heart rate. Yet with these activities, you probably won’t dread them like running on the treadmill or boot-camp classes. For most people, these activities don’t even fall into the category of exercise, and instead exist in the realm of play!
But Physical Fun does more than just get you moving, it can be the catalyst that inspires you to inject some of the more powerful and traditional health and fitness practices into your life. This is where the real magic happens.
Integrating resistance training, flexibility and mobility work, and consistent quality nutrition and sleep, are a few of the best practices when it comes to improving your overall health and fitness. These are activities we tend to avoid. They’re the “real” exercise, the dieting, the not-so-fun stuff that we know we should be doing.
An easy way to inspire yourself to do some of these best practices is by recognizing that they will enhance your Physical Fun!
Developing a stretching routine is easy once you realize it will allow you to kick higher in your kickboxing class.
You will find time for resistance training once you realize having more strength and power makes you a more dominant force in your recreational basketball league.
How much further would you be capable of hiking if you dialed in your nutrition and lost thirty pounds?
If you were well-rested and thinking clearly, how much easier would you pick up the new movements at your dance class?
It’s improvement in other areas of life that make integrating exercise and quality nutrition worth the effort.
Step one is finding a Physical Fun Activity.
Step two is determining how you can improve that Physical Fun Activity by injecting more traditional health and fitness practices into your life.
There are literally hundreds of activities you likely enjoy that can help you get in shape and act as a catalyst, you just need to start with one!
So what’s yours?